Shop to donate - products

Nowadays you can buy almost anything online and most of the online stores give commission to web sites which give them customers. The idea behind Shop to Donate is for a web site to give this commission to charity if you do your shopping using their links. Some Shop to Donate web sites have affiliate agreements with loads of different online shops and so they can also be called Charity Malls.

Let's say you want to buy a book from Amazon.com. You can buy the book directly from Amazon.com or you can buy it through Charity Cafe for example. The price is exactly the same and the product is exactly the same, but if you buy it using the links Charity Cafe, then Charity Cafe will receive a commission and donate that to charity. With Amazon.com for example the commission can be as high as 15% of your order value.

To get an idea of what kinds of things you can buy from a Charity Mall, visit the shopping page at Care2.com:
http://www.care2.com/shopping/shopping_categories_nogtu.html

Another good Charity Mall is called Igive.com:
http://www.igive.com

Here is a UK specific Charity Mall:
http://www.rectifi.org.uk

And here is a direct link to a charity mall from The Environment Site:

Shop to Donate reminders (for PC users only)

The real trick is to remember to go to a shopping to donate site when you are going to buy something. For that purpose there are reminder services (available only for PC at the moment). There are currently two reminder services that I know of, Green Thumbs Up from Care2.com and Forget Me Not from Greater Good:

"Forget Me Not is a separate program that runs in the background whenever you start your computer. It will pay attention to the URLs in your Internet browser window, and if it recognizes the URL for one of GreaterGood.com's more than 100 retailers, it will ask you if you want to shop on behalf of your favorite cause. If you select "Yes", within seconds Forget Me Not will redirect your path through GreaterGood.com to the merchant, so your shopping is credited in support of a good cause. "

Care2.com offers a similar service called Green Thumbs Up. Personally I have not been able to install this toolbar on my computer (IE7 on Windows XP), which is a pity because Green Thumbs Up would be much better than Forget Me Not from Greater Good. This is because Care2 donates 100% of their commission where as Greater Good only donates 50%. At the same time the Green Thumbs Up toolbar also shows you information about how eco-friendly websites and companies are.

Green Thumbs Up from Care2.com:
http://www.care2.com/greenthumb/

Forget Me Not from Greater Good:
www.greatergood.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/GreaterGood.woa/wa/downloadsPage